Contemporary fiction. Ethics. Literary criticism.

Category: Contemporary Fiction

There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he’d always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered –as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. (p.239)

This moment in Neuromancer is the description of the protagonist Case encountering a cyber-version of his murdered girlfriend, Linda Lee. It comes as the result of Case’s most prolonged “flat-lining” episode having been “jacked-in” to cyberspace – he arrives in a kind of digital-mental purgatory created by the AI Neuromancer. Case works out where he is, has sex with Linda, and then refuses Neuromancer’s offer of eternal digital life, beginning the narrative climax of the novel. This passage serves to emphasize, I think, how digital textuality in Neuromancer in-fact reproduces a hierarchy of reality over virtuality, one which retains the security of a heterosexual, masculine subject in the face of ontological uncertainty effectively navigated by Harawayan cyborg-female subjects such as Linda and Molly. When the concept of the cyborg as a radical imaginary becomes most pronounced, the novel draws back from it, unable to embrace a feminine irony, incoherence and uncertainty.

The desire Case feels for Linda in the encoded cyber-memory where he sees her is made-up of contradiction and irony. It weighs physically (“she pulled him down”) but it is also a technology, a “sea of information coded” which is simultaneously read as biological or “natural” (“pheromone.”) It is a then “drive”, understood in a paradoxical sense, “beyond knowing” but “read” by the body in a “strong” and “blind” process. The desire located in the body is seemingly unknowable information, both technological and “natural”, digital and physical. The passage works initially to create an uncertainty about the human-machine continuity. Only humans, not machines, can “read” the inarticulable desires of the body, but those desires can’t be thought outside of a technological literacy – the “strength” which Case recognises in Linda is born in the “relentless street” but is manifest here in digital through the powerful AI Neuromancer. The ambiguity of what it means to read – only the body can read a body, but here finds strength in a digital body – seems to create fertile ground for radical thinking about being (about ontology). Perhaps, for instance, desire could be conceived of without a binary of body/machine, and then without an anthropocentric notion of what constitutes sanctioned desire. The contradiction flesh presents to the digital could be retained as an emergent pleasure.

With this, Case becomes aware of the irony which conditions his way of thinking about the world: that while cyberspace enthusiastically attempts to jettison the body, as he desperately wants to, without the meat space, mocked by the cowboys, there is no cyberspace, no place from which to transcend. Digital bodily pleasure is physical bodily pleasure, despite the constant denigration of the physical body, and the sense that cyberspace is a transcendent project. But Neuromancer does not allow this irony to reconfigure the desiring, male subject. It does not persist, or manifest newly liminal pleasures, and as such reproduces a plastic cyborg position, which is only geographic or solely prosthetic (sublime, perhaps) rather than ontological. Any ironic realisation is subsumed, and used to reinforce patriarchal pleasure as a condition-of and goal-for the transcendental. The manner of going “beyond knowing”, whether by plugging into cyberspace or by pursuing desire in meat space, is limited by the conditions of the knowing it would seek to escape. This is confirmed by Case’s coherent reading of Linda, and the novel’s inability to see the situation of reading/unambiguous reading as a problem. Case and Linda have sex, “effecting the transmission of the old message”, a description which constructs Case’s desire as a form of reproductive/textual power, and seems to erase the sense that Linda is an uncertain digital construct. Case, concerned about what might be happening to him in this uncertain and unfamiliar cyberspace, then seeks out the boy incarnation of Neuromancer in order to better reach understanding. Linda tries to follow him, and is read as an object by Case, a now paradoxically tainted and human digital unfantasy: “She looked like one of the girls on Finn’s old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.” (p.243) While the uncertainty of the human-machine continuum suggested a way of re-imagining desire, the only character who can attempt to articulate it is our frightened, post-coital male cowboy. Regardless of where a possible reader might be on the human-computer continuum, the problem of who is able to read and how they do so is left unaddressed. After all, the “information coded in spiral and pheromone” is only readable by the body if the subject has a body which is allowed to engage in a performance of reading. Linda Lee is denied this reading agency, she is transmitted to as a node rather than reciprocally receiving something which she is allowed to process or think. This is because she is simultaneously computer code and woman. She is unable to even attempt to know that she is a “ghost”, as the boy-AI Neuromancer labels her, confined by Case’s fear of her ontological undecideability. The gendered way of knowing in “reality”, manifest as a coherent and certain process of reading, dominates ways of knowing the virtual, and thus the novel denies Linda’s possible place as a positive cyborg subject/myth/monster.

The main female character in the novel, Molly, possesses far greater agency in the text than Linda, but her resonance is limited in the final pages. Molly is able to read the constant irony of the human/machine continuity which defines the world of Neuromancer with a competency commensurate to (or better than) Case’s. However, the possibilities for such reading agency to move “beyond knowing” are confined at the end of the novel. Her final textual presence is a paper note explaining that her and Case’s relationship is “TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME […] IT’S THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS”.(p.267) which Case literally screws up. The knowing irony in the pun and Molly’s pragmatic voice humorously puncture Case’s romantic-cowboy trajectory. Her rejection of a traditional heterosexual relationship in favour of retaining a fugitive technological literacy makes Molly into a more robustly Harawayan cyborg figure than Linda Lee, although one which the novel is ultimately unwilling to reproduce, threatening as it is to the frame of a traditionally-gendered subjectivity. Case’s romantic vision keeps Molly in the role as lost lover: “I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.” (p.268) The final line of the novel is not a celebration of what Molly might uncertainly represent – the possibility of new pleasures, hybrid and necessarily incoherent identities – but provides an image of the heterosexual male haunted by both versions of his frustrated desire for the female body. “He never saw Molly again” contains a lament for the fact that neither the techno-ghost Linda nor the cyborg-Molly allows for the retention of a stable masculine subject, because of the uncertainty they provoke in human-machine and gendered terms. Molly disappears, and the possibility of continuing to read gendered/machine relations anew is stopped; the novel is literally unable to move beyond the male reader/narrator towards a cyborg one. The final version of the AI Wintermute – physically present as male, The Finn – is tellingly one of total coherence. That he is “Nowhere. Everywhere […] the sum total of the works, the whole show” is something which another female character, 3Jane’s mother “couldn’t imagine.” Such coherence is the only outcome the masculine imagination could foresee. The novel finishes having reinforced a vision of virtuality which glorified the male cyborg, for Case is the counter-cultural analogue of the military-industrial superhuman, a hacker-romantic-hero. The text retreats from the very cyberspace which would accommodate the female cyborg and allow them to flourish, taking solace instead in a romantic fantasy, a reality of eternal recuperation. In the words of the AI “[t]hings aren’t different” in the end, things like being, or gender. “Things are things.” (p.270)

James Wood famously/infamously labelled the novel an example of the “hysterical realism” which he felt characterized the later post-modernism of writers like Pynchon, DeLillo. Wood’s critique is an odd one, which decries the lack of humanity in these works. The challenge that these novels are “full of inhuman stories” has always sat quite strangely with me, with the implication being that “the grammar of storytelling” is somehow a thing which isn’t utterly human. It relies on a kind of normative standard for the idea of the good realist novel, one that must, in his parlance, lead us towards a consciousness. This is an unclear phrase, a kind of humanist jargon that literary critics like to fall back on, and it’s reinforced when Wood asks for a “return to an innocent mimesis”. Quick! Back to the Golden Age of 19__!

Far more perceptive, I think, is his description of these sorts of novels as reliant on information. “Information has become the new character” is a far more useful critical comment than claiming some innocent age where Henry James wrote all that was worth anything. It is this description of character which I think more interesting a way of exploring a novel like White Teeth.

Information appears in many different forms in White Teeth, always conspicuous by the form it takes – whether as encyclopaedia (being bought or sold), or DNA, or religious leaflets or pamphlets, or even as a drug. Samad’s morphine-high is an information overload: “all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire”. Archie says the men are wells of experience “like encyclopedias” (he is violently corrected by the women in novel). The bourgeois-family the Chalfens are most significantly a family who define themselves by knowing more, by having the information that other families don’t. We understand because we’ve read more, we’ve had more access to more information than you.

I would argue that information isn’t just a formal game, a meaningless web, as Wood suggests of White Teeth. The final setpiece – Marcus Chalfen’s presentation to an audience of the mouse who will help cure cancer – is a climax of human proportions. Sure, it’s mildly unbelievable that a network of such different groups would come together in this way. But all of them are attempting to sort different forms of information, different systems of belief and understanding, in order to fulfill they way of living. Information is something which drives human action in the novel, whether it is a desire for religious understanding or biological advances.

In a century where the very fabric of information has changed, Smith I think understands that information is entirely human – you are defined by what you understand, the kind of data you choose to interact with, what you share with others. In other words, I don’t think the wealth of information, the network, the web of White Teeth, means it moves away from consciousness, or the representation of consciousness, or whatever form of value you want to attach to the ostensibly realist novel. What the novel shows is that a logic of human connection, whatever language it is shrouded in, relies on exchange with each other. And that is what Smith’s work seems to privilege – an exchange, a gifting of human experience from one to the other. And it’s her concern for displaying the experience of the other which guides her formal experimentation, and I think the atmosphere of her works overall.

[1] (A joyful recommendation, here. Smith’s essay on David Foster Wallace in her collection Changing My Mind is one of the most perceptive appraisals of the writer I’ve ever come across, mainly because it isn’t hagiographic or vague, and is analytically rigorous without being inaccessible. It doesn’t rely on the uncritical presentation of extracts from stories (there’s lots of “isn’t this stuff just so human” when it comes to Wallace). Smith even challenges the self-help-oh-so-inspiring status of This Is Water (go listen to it rather than buying the ridiculous toilet book that’s been created). Her analysis of the key feature of Wallace, the recursive sentence, is excellent, because it gives substance to the discussion of Wallace as an ethicist, that tautological label “a moral writer”.)

I’m starting some work on Zadie Smith this summer, specifically her novel NW (2012). It seems to me to be the first attempt by a British author to directly address what it means to use the Internet, or to communicate digitally, and to ask (if only partially) how digital forms lead to a recalibration of ethical boundaries (or an augmenting of the possible acts available to us). This work comes after my draft first chapter, where I was trying to pick a route through digitality, literary ethics, modernism and twenty-first century literature, to set up a critical foundation from which to proceed. It tried to do too much at once – obviously – but the process was useful at least.

Part of what I was attempting to say in that first bit of writing, though, was that it is valuable to think about stuff written in the twenty-first century through the prism of the technological. Looking at texts from the modernist period in this way – Virginia Woolf, Henry James – highlights some important cultural conflicts, political anxieties and ethical concerns. Modernist writers were attempting to transcribe, translate or put into a form the relationship that society had with new mechanical and electrical stuff which created new ways of seeing the world. And there was a politics of expression that went along with that – which meant that a modernist perspective was often coupled with an acceptance that new technologies couldn’t be shunned, but must be understood, seen as an essential part of the cultural fabric, maybe even worshipped. Smith’s novel is one that understands this impulse. The difference in the contemporary period is that the technology, the new thing, is not only mechanical or electronic but the digital.

NW is a novel that testifies to the ubiquitous nature of digital interactions. It confirms the centrality of digital forms to many elements of lived experience. Most simply, mentions of digital forms of communication are littered throughout the book, as might be expected of the realist mode in which Smith tends to write. Characters get out their phones, look at websites, sit at laptops. The ills of technology are drably agreed upon during a dinner party by faceless guests.

Critically, a digital form of communication works as a central plot device, creating perhaps the defining moment of conflict in a novel which is generally more interested in the quotidian or the points when characters notice time passing. The central character, who changes her name from Keisha to Natalie, performs a sexual transgression which is primarily a digital one. In a section knowingly entitled Love in the ruins,she cheats on her husband with two young men in a “50s semi” in Wembley, facilitated by a “listings” website, on which she is known by the handle WildInWembley and her email address is KeishaNW. The freedom Keisha/Natalie finds in this particular form of communication is that of temporarily leaving her role as head of household and “big lady jesus” lawyer. Having changed her name once, the textual avatars she uses online refer back to her previous identity. In one sense, the online space provides a place where Keisha can perform an identity that she feels she can no longer materially embody – she has moved on too far from her family and her upbringing. At the same time, in the “listings” website she is “BF [black female] 18-35” – she becomes a sought after sexual fantasy, a racially-defined fetish for couples and naive young men. “Why?” asks the narrative “What do they think we can do? What is it we have that they want?” This, however, is as far as the narrative goes in questioning the racial biases of the “listings” website. Keisha turns up at the house of drug addicts, and then later a moneyed bourgeois couple – on both occasions the sex is cancelled, the first because the couple are too high, and the second because Keisha is not able to, in that moment, satisfactorily separate her status as fetish from her life as Natalie, the professional.

There is more to be said about the extant presentation of digital forms in this novel, not least the fact that Keisha’s use of the website is a) described in flat, quotidian terms (“She went to the website. She went to bed”) which perhaps reflects a complacent, liberal understanding of the Internet as a utopian space. There is also the Chat Roulette used by the men that Keisha engages in sexual activity with, whom she chastises (“Boys, boys, why are we doing this? You’ve got the real thing right here.”)The political dimensions of the digital forms seem essentially flat, impotent. “Look, there is race, anonymity, and porn online” the text seems to say, “isn’t it terrible?”

I’ll finish this piece about my initial ideas with what I think is the most important engagement with digitality in the novel, a chat dialogue between Keisha and Leah which is printed in the text itself. From one perspective, it’s just another epistolary gimmick (Exhibit B being Smith’s On Beauty, where she re-imagines the opening letter of Howards End as an e-mail). But I would argue the effect is more radical than that, that there is evidence that this particular passage says a lot about the different ways of seeing that this particular digital form facilitates and how they are transformed when it is fixed into the pages of a print novel:

shut it blake
That’s just so fucking FASCINATING
Hello hanwell DARLING. What brings you to the internets this
fine afternopn
noonwoman next to me picking nose really getting in theretried to call but you no answerdelighteful.

This can be viewed as rupturing the form of the novel, because it cancels the normally ever present omniscient-third-person voice, one which is highlighted in ironic asides or philosophical observations. It becomes absence here, where in the rest of the novel it is either explicit or dropped into at certain moments. As such, the computer-mediated-communication, the tangible presence of this particular layout, this peculiar form, emphasises the absence of the controlling, omniscient voice. It becomes an ethical encounter which lacks the mediating presence of the novel. Any mediation or distance between the reader and characters comes in the form of the permanent appearance of a normally permeable (or alterable) textual form – the chat dialogue. It is in the midst of these textual tensions that an important ethical question is raised:

[…}lady jesus I am getting married
!!!!!?????on may
that’s great! When did this happen???Six in registry same like u but irth actyl guestsI’m really happy for you seriouslyActual guests.
Iz for mum really.rightalso, I really love him.lust him.
Important to him and he wants to.
It’s what people do innit.sorry clerk one minenough reasons?

The important ethical question, although one of privilege and bourgeois choice – should I marry this man – is never answered by Keisha, and the reader might choose to assume the veracity of her need to suspend the conversation for work. (Incidentally, both characters are at work, in the kind of jobs which afford them basically unobstructed internet access. I can’t work out what to say about this yet past the fact that internet is not a magical world but another aspect of material living conditions from which you can be alienated/prevented from accessing). Keisha couldn’t answer her phone, so Leah tells her using an instantaneous message. Later, the irony of the speed of the message is emphasized when she complains that the two of them are getting old. A moment of life-changing significance – one which a reader might explain a realist novel to make more of – happens instantly – should-I-get-married is not, “a different kind of moment” as Leah describes the Kierkegaardian “instant” earlier in the novel. The mediated nature of their interaction influences the ways there are of reading their relationship, changes the ethical possibilities available for knowing their relationship. For example, when Keisha asks Leah about having children, her emoji response changes the texture of the exchange:

[…]

Does this mesn
Mean procreation??FUCK OFF WOMAN🙂FUCK OFF WITH YOUR SMILEY FACE

The emoji shifts the mode signification – it’s a familiar element of internet discourse, but it’s unfamiliar when fixed in the pages of a novel. Face, and the presentation of the face as an important element of the way that human beings relate to each other, is foregrounded here, as it is throughout the novel. The smiley face of Keisha is, perhaps, an over-determined signifier. It appears to represent her inarticulacy, and her desire to mask seriousness with humour, yet it also tells us she has an understanding of internet culture and language patterns (she welcomes Leah to “the Internets” earlier in this section). Leah’s reaction is comic, but also neutralizes the seriousness of the question which is then not addressed again – a question which is arguably the ethical dilemma which defines Leah’s character. The smiley alters the ethical terrain of the interaction – and the two characters suppress or change the direction of the conversation. The digital format of this interaction means the effects of it are stark, because the ethical ground on which it happens is unfamiliar.

Much more could be said about this passage, in terms of its poetics, the way that the text-as-novel consciously manipulates the form of the communication (the knowing line breaks, the lack of time stamps, the switching between standard and non-standard English, the asynchronicity of the communication , the presence or absence of a Levinasian version of the face). But I’d best stop, and start reading again.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

Cynicism about digital communication is what initially characterizes Paul O’Rourke, the existentially anguished dentist narrator at the heart of Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again At A Decent Hour. The novel is partly existential, but at the same time extremely wry in the manner of its philosophizing. In it, Paul O’Rourke, a successful but socially-inept dentist undergoes a temporary crisis brought about by a patient impersonating him online. This is not, however, some kind of financial thriller or tech-mystery, but a work that uses the Internet and digital communication to frame a contemporary existential anxiety. Paul’s identity is stolen by someone claiming to be part of a religion he has never heard of, and the central strand wherein we learn about the Ulms and their relationship to the Jewish faith runs in tandem with Paul’s own particularly contemporary search for meaning and connection.

Ferris shows us the contradictory ethical position on Internet communication and smart phones which we see posited daily in Western society. That is, things that encourage personal digital communication (i.e. smart phones, “me machines” as they are referred to derogatorily by Paul) lessen our ability to be concerned with, or by, other people. Speaking hypothetically to a patient, Paul outlines the extreme position, where the meta-data about the event takes the place of the event itself:

[Y]ou’re no longer able to sit in the waiting room and not check your e-mail no matter how sick your kid is. I know, I have a waiting room, I see it happen all the time. Even in the emergency room, you’d be texting and e-mailing and tweeting about how your kid was in the emergency room and how worried you were.

This perspective chimes with the narrator’s general cynicism about all of developed society – it’s the easiest way he finds of chastising a developed social world that he can’t connect to; later while alone, he ironically toasts the “frittatas and sex tapes”, “personal brand maintenance” and “echo-chamber[s] and reflecting pool[s]” of the millennial generation. When he cuts off Internet access at his dental surgery, however, Ferris makes him appear a foolish philistine, and the novel is one that acknowledges the hypocrisy of its narrator. Paul’s position on digital communication is a form of fear which turns into social anxiety – that the Internet presents to me all the things that I could be doing, but am not:

liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I’ve never in my life felt more disconnected. It’s like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected.

The irony comes in that although Paul is one of those disconnected, throughout the novel his internet use becomes more and more involved. He himself concedes he is a regular internet user and that this has happened mostly without his realizing:

It wouldn’t have caused me such grief if my repulsion and eventual capitulation to the emoticon had not mirrored my larger struggle with the Internet itself. I tried my best to fend off the Internet’s insidious seduction, until at last all I did – at chairside, on the F train, supine upon the slopes of Central Park – was gaze into my me-machine and lose myself on the Internet.

The problem comes when you have very little self to lose on the internet. Within Ferris’s novel is an assumption about the Internet as a tool to present the self, or an extension of the self, which developed in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Paul is constantly anxious that the people in his day-to-day life know that the person acting in his name online is not him, and some of the central conflicts come in discussions over iPads, the critiquing of tweets by his former lover Connie and coworker Betsy Convoy. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour shows the Internet of Web 2.o, where the concept of a digital world is one which corresponds exactly to everyday lived experience, where embodied self and internet self are seen by society as one and the same thing, in that one creates and informs the other.

Paul’s initial hostility to social media and digital communication can be connected to his fears about whether or not he is a person with a coherent and meaningful identity. At one point, Connie tells Paul that he should tell everyone who he really is, to be outraged about the fake-Paul online, but this serves to highlight that Paul himself is struggling with the idea of how to define himself, especially while alone. Even for an online identity to be a subversion, it has to be a subversion of a social face that you are clear about, or happy with. A form of hyper self-awareness is required. For Ferris’s protagonist, confrontation with the Internet actually becomes confrontation with himself. He lacks clarity about how to connect to others, as typified by the manner in which he falls in love, allowing himself to be defined by his relationship to another. The novel can be seen as Ferris’ working through the ways in which Paul “emailing with [him]self” – that is, engaging in a dialogue with the man who is impersonating him – is a method of reevaluating his place in the world.

The most significant moments of this reevaluation are those when Paul is alone in his apartment, attempting to understand the existential anxiety that overtakes him. He feels loneliness keenly, due to the suicide of his father when he was still a young boy, and this event frames Paul’s nihilism:

The night was now as dark as it could get, and from thinking of how dark the night was and of my forfeited options, I proceeded to think of how alike this one night might be to my last night on earth, when all options, and not just one night’s options, expired. Every night was a night of limitless possibility expired, of a life forfeited, of a foreclosed opportunity to expand, explore, risk, hope, and live.

Sublime images of destruction follow this fear – flooding, storms, wars, everything “sweet and surprising [going] dark against the vast backdrop of the universe”. With this, Paul gets out of bed and checks his email, where there is “still no answer” from whoever is impersonating him online. He also calls Connie, who doesn’t answer, and in this moment the “me-machine” becomes an engine of paranoia, where Paul “has to conclude that at the moment she might have been calling or sending me a text, not only was she doing neither, in all likelihood she wasn’t even thinking about me.”

At the moment where things are as dark as they can get, and where Paul feels most alone (he imagines all the other insomniacs finally asleep) he searches for assurance that another human being is thinking about him. The digital communication Paul loathes and fears is used by Ferris as a way of emphasizing his alienation at the same time as it is a conduit for “limitless possibility”. There is an inherent tension in his relationship to this kind of communication; the desperate need for the connection but the desire not to find rejection. This is the same character who religiously watches tapes of the Red Sox on VCR, where there is only a one way conduit – where possibilities are fixed, where nothing is missed. There is just a controlled nostalgia, one that is individualized, without dialogue, or the need to connect to another, or with the concurrent fear of missing a connection. At a later point, the same desperation for connection is seen in a similarly dark and lonely moment, but he doesn’t only hope for Connie, but for anyone to have connected:

I felt so forgotten, so passed over, so left behind, so lost out. I was sure not only that everything worth doing had already been done while I was asleep but also that, now that I was awake, there was no longer anything worth doing. The solution at desperate moments like this was always to find something to do, and I mean anything, as quickly as possibly. My first instinct was to reach for my me-machine. It put me in instant touch, it gave me instant purpose. Maybe Connie had called or texted or emailed, or Mercer, or… but no. No one had called or emailed or texted.

Paul still reaches for his device, but it is the possibility for connection that he is searching for. He is disconnected, and becoming “more disconnected” through the possibilities that he can never fulfill. In this sense, his confrontation with the Internet can be constructed as one around his own desires, something which can never be fulfilled.

The novel does partly resolve, with a shift in Paul’s perspective on what it is to live a meaningful life. The end of the novel is framed by discussions on the Ulm wikipedia page and e-mails from a newly married Connie. The Internet becomes an unspoken part of Paul’s new outlook, where limitless possibility exist as a path to follow – to just “do it all” – rather than a reason to shun connection. Ferris’s novel tells us to get on with living in every form available, to remain aware that fear of being alone in a society on the Internet is a kind of existential FOMO – if someone else is doing it, why should I do any of it at all?
Bibliography:
Ferris, J. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, Viking, London, 2014

“Without a sense of how weird the present is — how potentially weird the present is — it became impossible for me to judge how much weirder I should try to make an imagined future.” – William Gibson

I’ve just finished William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003). Anyone who isn’t familiar with his work is probably more aware of his influence than they think. Without Gibson, for example, The Matrix probably wouldn’t exist, having taken its cue from his seminal science-fiction novel Neuromancer (1984), where we first find the concept of cyberspace articulated.

I’m interested in Gibson for two reasons. Firstly, because of how his recent writing provides a unique perspective on twenty-first century genre. With Pattern Recognition, which is the first in the Blue Ant trilogy, we see an established sci-fi author alter the boundary between serious literary fiction and science fiction. Furthermore, Gibson’s line above acknowledges what has been a strand in literary criticism on the contemporary, that the now is too interesting in and of itself – he’s a significant commentator on how we understand the contemporary. The second is that, having only read Neuromancer earlier this summer (and becoming a complete evangelist for it in the process, telling all and sundry that this was a work of sci-fi that is still extremely powerful in the present day), I was keen to see how Gibson’s style has developed up until this point.

Pattern Recognition makes free use of new media interaction. Gibson understands the proliferation of this kind of communication as significant to human experience. These forms of signification, the descriptions of screen-time, connection and online communities are central to the messages if the novel, and arguably the most important and essential relationships we see are almost wholly conditioned by technological interaction.

The protagonist is Cayce, who works as a kind of finder for a form of postmodern ad agency, identifying “cool” when she sees it, understanding which logos and designs will work simply by a form of intuition. It is an ability which works the other way too, with brands she finds disturbing causing an extreme phobic response. She becomes embroiled in a hunt for the maker of the Footage, an internet film phenomenon. The Footage is a modular avant-garde event, sections of film released sporadically and anonymously, one which has garnered a cult following online. Cayce is part of F:F:F, Fetish:Footage:Forum, a site dedicated to intricate and impassioned discussion of the origin, style and possible purpose of the Footage.

Gibson’s thriller plot is essentially a holding pattern for Cayce’s interactions with the community, and with her own struggles to maintain a grip on her jet-lagged soul. Her constant travel across the globe means that she is constantly out-of-sync with the cities in which she resides. Her moments of connection – the screens, the community – provide some level of personal security:

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar cafe that exists somehow outside of natural geography and beyond time zones.

The community is expertly drawn by Gibson (there have a developed vocabulary for delineating which hermeneutic gang various users are in – “Kubrick’s Garage” or “Spielberg’s Closet?”). For Cayce, the community around the Footage, and the Footage itself, provide a connection which she otherwise lacks. When asked if it’s just that she’s reading too much into it, she confirms that there is something ineffable, either in the footage itself, or in the process, which keeps her returning:

I’ve wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there’s that sense of … I don’t know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?

Cayce constantly struggles to comprehend the narrative she is part of, or the universe that has allowed her father to go missing. F:F:F provides a form of imaginative understanding that helps to augment her personal understanding. This kind of interaction is not a complete comfort and saviour, but it does provide the displaced person with a temporary sense of connection, and thus control.

Cayce makes reference to metaphors of the soul because of her disjunction from time zones and the constantly weirder events that take place in them. The constant is her internet connection, her ability to read correspondence those few figures in her life which help to ground her one form of fixed and controllable identity. Her personal proximity with Parkaboy – an influential user on the F:F:F site – increases throughout the novel, even while geographical proximity becomes so distant and multifarious as not to matter. Cayce acknowledges the shift in proximity, the movement of F:F:F into her reality, as something physical – a negating of the metaphor of screen world:

She looks at the phone and wonders who Parkaboy is […] But now, in some way she can’t quite grasp, the universe of F:F:F is everting. Manifesting physically in the world.

The very structure of the novel acknowledges that new media connections serve multiple essential purposes, but that one of its main functions is to do with the texture of loneliness. Cayce is utterly lonely throughout the novel, and the increasing recurrence of e-mail communication provides a foundation, the potential of close human connection, which might bring her soul back in check, cope finally with the loss of her father. Later in the novel, when her sense of displacement is most acute, she keeps searching for the right connection through those familiar portals:

Checking her mail.
Timing out, empty.
Sleep no longer an issue […]
Showers.
Does not think.

Most of the varying narrative strands are in fact concluded through e-mail correspondence, as though confirming that these are narratives Cayce now, part-resolved, can comfortably sees herself as legible element of. In this sense, the ethical question at the centre of the novel is around how to maintain connections that will keep us in existence. For Gibson, comprehending and gaining some control over the narratives which make up our existence, and maintaining the identities which allow us to understand and control our lives, is an act that is supplemented by new media connection. He understands that new technologies become a part of us, because they constantly redefine what it means to be present, or consistently alive:

We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television.

If Pattern Recognition could be called a novel that chronicles one form of plunge into the vortices of change, then it readily accepts and describes the redefinition that comes with it. New media, technologically-conditioned-communication, is another way of trying to play the game of catch-up with the soul, of working out ways of being less alone.

The tension between state and individual is arguably what defines the most influential or important literary dystopias. Zeh’s novel – The Method (2009) – is an original modern example of a genre which essentially asks the same questions of human society through different sci-fi tropes – what rights of the individual can be sustained or justified in the face of a government which purports to work for the greater good of society? The closest analogue here is Huxley, but there are shades of other sci-fi stylists to be found. The form, I would argue, is tangibly different, and significantly so for the way we understand its messages about ethical conflict. It is almost aphoristic in places – Nietzsche is ever-present in the protagonist’s brother, Moritz – and the narrative voice contains a lachrymose note, a resignation, as if asking the question itself is problematic, a repetitive structure. It doesn’t have the pride of a self-reflexive post-modernism, but a kind of weary fatigue, a concern about how the answer should be or could be phrased.

In this sense, I’d suggest the form and structure of this conflict narrative is a peculiarly twenty-first century version of the subject and society. We often understand the central question as a conflict between the protagonist and key symbolic, authoritarian characters – John and Mustapha Mond, Winston and O’Brien, D-503 and the Benefactor – but in The Method there are multiple representatives of authority – Sophie, Hutschneider, Kramer, Barker – all of them with their own personal holdings of virtues and vices. There is no singular dystopian figure; throughout the novel these characters become more transparent, more morally complex. They are only in part representative of The Method, that is, the notion that the literal health of society, the eradication of disease and the monitoring of citizen body metrics to maintain collective social vitality, constitutes the ultimate condition of social well-being. In the hands of those characters with access to power, this biological-utilitarianism becomes what every other ethical system becomes – a vehicle to enact authority and manipulate the populace. The ‘Right to Illness’ is in part linked a la Brave New World to humanism and liberal ideas, with the smoking of cigarettes turned into a revolutionary act, but the eventual resistance to the system stems from the uncovering of political corruption and mass concerns over political control, not a sustained challenge to the ethical status of The Method itself.

The generic convention of rebelling against the forces of dystopian oppression is subverted subtly by Zeh, in a way which indicates a wider, less easily identified ideological conflict. Mia Holl asks for “time to herself”, “peace and quiet” and explains “she wouldn’t mind being ill”. This is indicative of a kind of malaise, brought on by mourning, rather than any kind revolutionary zeal. Mia is upset by the political and personal circumstances surrounding her brother’s death. As a scientist, she does not wish to reject the ideals of the method entirely – her concerns are about the institutions which establish it. Her discussions with Moritz recur throughout the novel and demonstrate that she does not work in philosophical absolutes. Zeh allows the conflict between social good and individual freedom to continually run inside Mia. She is also called liminal – a “witch” – and the process through which she is to be punished by the state compounds her ethical status further. She is to be frozen in a form of stasis.

The person who calls her a witch is Zeh’s most intriguing formal creation, the ideal inamorata. This character is somewhere between morality-play-figure, a basic realist foil and a sexual partner. She sometimes resembles a kind of late 19th century aesthete in tone and manner:

Mia is sitting at her desk with her back to the room; from time to time she jots something down on one of the sheets of paper in front of her. Meanwhile, the ideal inamorata is reclining on the couch, clad in her beautiful hair and the light of the afternoon sun. We don’t know if she understands what Mia is saying or even if she can hear her voice because she doesn’t show any sign of listening or understanding. For all we know, the ideal inamorata may live in another dimension that borders on Mia’s world. Her gaze, as she stares into space, resembles the lidless stare of a fish.

The ideal inamorata’s “relationship to matter is tenuous” and this is something which defines her as apart from the world of the novel. Often, this semi-character provides significant insights as to the nature of Mia’s self, or the nature of the conflict at hand. In a novel that is concerned with the political status of the body, a clarifying voice is given to a character who is disembodied. When Kramer first enters Mia’s apartment the uncertain status of the ideal inamorata is confirmed – “he is untroubled by the look of revulsion on the ideal inamorata’s face – not because he doesn’t care what she thinks, which he probably doesn’t, but because he can’t see her.” Kramer both sees and doesn’t see this character, because she exists within the margins of the form of the narrative. She interacts structurally in conventional ways – she is part of dialogue, she is described spatially in the same way as other characters – but she shifts the form of the narrative. The ideal inamorata ruptures the fabric of the ethical totality of health, as such rupturing the fabric of the dystopian world, . Undermining all of our desires to see the novel as a way choose how to be good, to rebel against oppression, to explain the threat to individual liberties caused by the blind commitment to a moral hegemony, is negation embodied by this particularly unreal piece of formal experimentation. Even when the inamorata calls Mia to “make a decision”, denying the middle ground over whether Moritz’s death was “good or bad”, she immediately follows it with a call to stasis – she calls Mia over to sit on the couch, turns on the TV and the chapter ends.

And it’s this I think that the novel gets right, the notion that ethical conflicts in the current age are tired. It is linked to the language used to define moral concepts, which on both sides appears to lack clarity or conviction. The status of every character in this novel is psychologically and morally messy. Even the end of the novel establishes a kind of stasis – it isn’t Winston or John’s end. (Cf. the ‘not quite endings’ of other twenty-first century novels). Contained within you’ll find clear critiques of Utilitarian desires to define and live by opposing forces of pain and pleasure (Kramer’s first and second category idea) and you’ll feel the same revulsion at the illegitimate powers exercised by a totalitarian authority. But the relationships between characters go beyond any kind of moral clarity provided by traditional moral language, and the fact that the clarifying voice of the inamorata exists outside of the protagonist’s reality, outside of the formal reality of the dystopia itself, serves to confirm this.